Nathan Scandella (personal)

One Last Chance to Show the (Alaskan) Way

Well, we've got the viaduct replacement plan in the news again. Boondoggles "R" Us enters Phase III. Or was it Phase IV? I don't know phases.

This time, the planners re-expanded the set of viaduct replacement options to eight, or nine, and then contracted them back down to two for the Governor to pick from. The same Governor that has been unable to demonstrate any leadership on this issue for the last four years. Maybe she'll punt, and ask the Supreme Court to decide the issue.

Last time we were confronted with this painful issue, we had an "advisory" vote in Seattle, which gave the citizens of the city a chance to argue about the issue, spend loads of time and money on both sides of the campaign, only to have the vote be completely non-binding (isn't that called a poll?). First of all, the dufus who designed the vote placed two choices on the ballot, each which could be voted up or down. So, I guess that makes four choices. Unless, of course, you realize that it doesn't make any sense to ultimately select both options (you can't build both a tunnel and a bridge in the same spot), so that means there were really three options. But, only two choices. Got it?

Then, after the results were tallied:

• 30% of the public wanted a tunnel


• 43% wanted a new (elevated) viaduct

So, clearly, neither option received 50%. The Let's-Do-Nothing-Crowd, which unfortunately includes a lot of treehuggers and generally impractical liberals in this town, took these results to mean that the public voted for a Surface Transit Option. Huh? I just outlined three, or four possible options in this vote. Surface Transit was not one of them. Why does Surface Transit get to be the default just because the issue was worded to encourage both options to fail?

If you have an election with three candidates, and none of them gets 50%, do you just not elect anybody? No. Whoever got the most votes should win. In some cases, that may be a candidate (option) with less than 50% of the vote! Even if you assume that everyone that voted No on both options did actually want this mythical Surface Transit option (bogus assumption, of course), there's still poor justification for announcing that option a winner. Of course, only the election board knows for sure, but I have a strong suspicion that not all of the Tunnel Yes crowd also voted for another viaduct. If that happened, then theoretically, as many as 57% of Seattlites could have voted No-No. But, much more likely was that people would assume that you can't have both a tunnel and a viaduct, and therefore Yes-Yes is not an option. If that was the case, then the 30% tunnel-lovers and 43% viaduct-voters would be mutually exclusive groups. Which would leave only (100 - 43 - 30 = ) 27% of the public wanting to support some kind of surface transit alternative.

Even if we do the highly generous, and statistically nonsensical thing and split the difference between these two extreme results (perfect tunnel/viaduct overlap, and zero tunnel/viaduct overlap), you arrive at the conclusion that only 42% of the public voted No on both. Which means that in our more-than-two-candidate election, Surface Transit stills comes in second (42% is less than 43%!).

How the hell could all these Teva-wearing busriders have so confidently usurped the results for their nonexistent plan? Nobody in this country pays attention in math class, that's how. Governor Gregoire and Mayor Nickels included.

Maybe the Governor will make all this right, and pick the viaduct replacement option after all. That would be the right thing to do at this point. Punting any longer on replacing this death trap is just irresponsible. With plenty of options for greening up transportation, and a new President talking about just that, I don't believe simply contracting the amount of roads we have is the right way to fight climate change. That will just force businesses and homeowners to move to places like Issaquah (aka Sprawl City, WA), where they are willing to provide roads. Traffic in Seattle will continue to worsen, and our internal combustion engines will continue to idle inefficiently waiting for traffic to start moving again.

Or we could buck the trend, and pretend that transportation is important in this city.

Posted at 12:43AM Dec 13, 2008 by Nathan in Environment  |  Comments[0]